Sustainable Bristol

No Impact Man

by Paul Rainger

Posted on 2 September 2010 | No responses

No toilet paper, no electricity, no problem?

A series of one-off screenings with Q&As of ‘No Impact Man’ are taking place UK wide on Tuesday 7th Sept – an extreme experiment in eliminating your environmental impact, this entertaining documentary certainly makes you think about the resources we use everyday.

Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year.

It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator. It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, busses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no… Continue reading

Beef needn’t be bad for the environment

by Paul Rainger

Posted on 26 August 2010 | No responses

I often read that meat-eaters and dairy drinkers are responsible for several million tonnes of CO2 produced by raising livestock, and we all need to become vegetarians to save the planet – writes worried beef lover, Jonathan Green, of Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Bristol team.

Looking at the figures it’s easy to see why:

The damage to the environment of our food production systems has been well documented. Agriculture is heavily reliant on fossil fuels (eg. fertilizers, pesticides, fuel for machinery and distribution) and often causes damage, some of it irreparable, to the environment in the form… Continue reading

Dig Bristol submits city food plans

by Simon Billing

Posted on 20 August 2010 | No responses

The Bristol Food Network’s Dig Bristol project has been submitted  to the  lottery local food fund. The proposal really creates a manageable initial project out of the overall Sustainable Food strategy for Bristol.

Dig Bristol will enable small scale community food groups around Bristol to work together to increase the amount of land and numbers of people involved in growing food across the city.

Over three years, Dig Bristol will:

• Double the scale of the community food sector in Bristol from 40 groups to 80, bringing in an additional 1.5 hectares of land into new food production, and match community groups… Continue reading

Bristol businesses leading the way on green efficiency

by Simon Billing

Posted on 13 August 2010 | No responses

Bristol Water became the 50^th business in August to sign up to a regional initiative that’s helping West of England firms lead the country in tackling climate change.  The West of England Carbon Challenge is the first regional initiative of its kind that brings together businesses and organisations in cutting carbon emissions and improving energy efficiency. 

By signing up to the challenge, Bristol Water joins other businesses in the sub-region demonstrating their leadership in carbon reduction.

Patric Bulmer, Environment Manager at Bristol Water says: “Joining the West of England Carbon Challenge helps us demonstrate that we’re committed to carbon reduction and that we… Continue reading

Bristol’s Great British Refurb

by Ben Ross

Posted on 5 August 2010 | No responses

Imagine the ideal situation. A homeowner can easily install energy efficiency measures without paying a penny and a situation were the housing sector in the UK significantly reduces its carbon output (remember it accounts for 26% of the UK’s national emissions) in the climate change fight.

Thanks to the Great British Refurb, one pioneering house in Bristol already earns more from making energy than from using it.

But we still have many more things to achieve in the coming year which is a crucial one writes WWF’s Yael Rosenfeld. The new government is about to introduce an energy bill to the Parliament with provisions on new finance mechanisms to help home owners finance these eco-refurbishments. It must be ambitious in its scope to kick start a mass retrofitting programme in the UK.

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Can a hundred year old Bristol property become a PassivHaus?

by Ben Ross

Posted on 3 August 2010 | No responses

 

The Re-habit retrofit project in Bristol is part of the £17m Retrofit for the Future programme launched by the Technology Strategy Board in 2009.

Focusing on the existing social housing stock, the programme seeks to identify 50 prototype whole dwelling solutions, to deliver significant cuts in energy use and carbon emissions, while also providing high levels of comfort and affordable running costs.

The Bristol Re-habit team has selected a typical “2-up 2-down” Victorian terraced property, based in the Easton area of Bristol, which will be used as supported housing for homeless families.

Re-habit… Continue reading

Agroforestry for a Happy Future

by Paul Rainger

Posted on 18 June 2010 | 3 responses

Bristol’s leading agroforestry expert, Adrian Morley, makes the case for our city-regions to focus just as hard on managing their biospheres, as their material flows, on the journey towards zero carbon:

Is the only sustainable security we should be thinking about is our dependency on the practically unrenewable lithosphere – the Earth’s crust? Of course not, we also need to focus on using what’s growing on the Earth to provide for our needs – the biosphere.

So far we can only manage the biosphere by using lots of energy, water and chemicals, to achieve less productive and severely degraded systems than what would have naturally been there anyway. Quite simply we need to stop digging up the Earth’s crust and spewing it all over the place (including the Gulf of Mexico), and start concentrating on managing the biosphere in order to promote its health and to provide for us. If we need to tap into the Earth, let’s be very sensible and conservative in what we use it for.

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Bath project on solid-wall insulation and renewable energy

by Paul Rainger

Posted on 15 June 2010 | No responses

Matthew Rees and Phillip Morris, from the Centre for Sustainable Energy, report on the first of 15 retrofits in Bath of hard to treat properties with solid wall insulation and renewable energy measures.

The Bath and Bristol city region has a particularly high proportion of hard-to-treat solid-walled properties ( around 50% of the homes in Bristol) which aren’t currently suitable for mainstream insulation schemes.

But the UK Government won’t meet its tough carbon reduction targets without addressing these so called hard to treat solid wall properties.

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Dreaming of Environmental Sustainability in Bristol City-Region

by Paul Rainger

Posted on 2 June 2010 | No responses

Matthew Taylor, PhD researcher into the Environmental Sustainability of the Bristol City-Region, dreams of the future from his Totterdown window.

2010: The orange streetlit glow of the City of Bristol, viewed from the suburb of Totterdown on a cold and wintry January evening. Lighting, courtesy of electricity mass-generated from the combustion of coal, nuclear fission of uranium and the combustion of natural gas (methane). Inhabitants kept warm predominantly from on-site combustion of natural gas. Their food, water, medicine, cosmetics, clothes, furnishings and consumer goods have been produced,  processed and/or transported through the use of various products of crude oil.

Now… Continue reading

Linking the City to the natural world

by Paul Rainger

Posted on 27 May 2010 | No responses

One of three BNHC flagship events held each year in Bristol, Festival of Nature visitors have the chance to encounter wild animals – both the familiar and the exotic – take part in hands-on experiments, and quiz some of the UK’s leading scientists, in the only free event of its kind in the UK.

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